Tuesday, September 2, 2008

The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh has picked up a 600-thousand dollar grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to tackle a massive digitizing project. The money will be used to first catalog and then digitize the library’s iron and steel collection. The materials dating back to the 1800’s are housed at the Allegheny depository on the north side. Library director Barbara mistick says the more than 400-thousand pages in the collection need to be preserved because the space is not climate controlled and already about 20% of the collection is “too fragile to touch.” Once the items are digitized they will be put on line where readers can add annotations to the collection. Along with books about steelmaking the collection holds catalogs from area steelmakers.